We've heard talk of a sequel. How do you plan to transition your fan base to Guild Wars 2?

I think we can say Guild Wars 2 will have many things we wanted to do in Guild Wars, but done better. I think it's also valid to say that since Guild Wars 2 will continue the tradition of no monthly fee, there is no downside to our fan base playing both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 together. In that way, it is very much an extension of the Guild Wars universe and doesn't require the player to leave Guild Wars. On top of all that, we have the Hall of Monuments in Guild Wars, which is designed to allow players to carry the prestige of some of their Guild Wars achievements over to Guild Wars 2.

Universal Pictures has put the brakes on "Bioshock," the Gore Verbinski-directed live action adaptation of the bestselling Take-Two Interactive vidgame. The picture was in pre-production, but the studio has halted that effort--and let some production staff go--as Universal and Verbinski figure out a way to make the film at a more reasonable budget.

"We were asked by Universal to move the film outside the U.S. to take advantage of a tax credit," Verbinski said. "We are evaluating whether this is something we want to do. In the meantime, the film is in a holding pattern."

Verbinski and sources at the studio say they are determined to make the pic. Indeed, Verbinski (who has also been directing the Paramount animated film "Rango" with Johnny Depp) bowed out of directing a fourth installment of "Pirates of the Caribbean" so that he could direct "Bioshock" and produce under his Blind Wink banner.

All parties vow that "Bioshock" will not become another "Halo," the live action adaptation of the Microsoft game that was going to be turned into a film by U and Fox until both studios got cold feet and cancelled the deal over budget fears.

At first, the quirky nature of the story, and even of the story-telling, are captivating and encourage the player to dig deeper into the mystery and start putting the pieces together. The trouble is that things don't really come together soon enough to keep the mystery interesting. Even after playing for several hours, we're no closer to figuring out what's going on. We've heard that the ultimate resolution manages to tie most of the elements together in a neat little package, but since we hit a massive no-clip bug about two-thirds of the way in, whether the ending is great or not is kind of a moot point. In any case, the game needed to have solved at least a few of the mysteries before we gave up on it.

At first, the quirky nature of the story, and even of the story-telling, are captivating and encourage the player to dig deeper into the mystery and start putting the pieces together. The trouble is that things don't really come together soon enough to keep the mystery interesting. Even after playing for several hours, we're no closer to figuring out what's going on. We've heard that the ultimate resolution manages to tie most of the elements together in a neat little package, but since we hit a massive no-clip bug about two-thirds of the way in, whether the ending is great or not is kind of a moot point. In any case, the game needed to have solved at least a few of the mysteries before we gave up on it.

Final Score: A 'Passable' 6.0/10.

Presumably this is for StarCraft II, but you never know, it may be Diablo III or World of StarCraft...

QotD: If you could bring back one television show from the dead (one that was either cancelled or had just run its course), which show would it be?

I think Firefly was cancelled way before its time. I would say X-Files but it stunk too bad towards the end. I'm sure there are plenty, but a couple of others that come to mind are... Wonderfalls, Journeyman, and does anyone remember that show called "Earth 2"? I dug that, but it only lasted one season back in '94. Another one is Jericho, but I think they could have done so much more with that show.

Fun Facts For Saturday

• In 2005 a husband and wife each won the lottery by playing numbers on a fortune cookie.
• A man who chose the personalized license plate "NO PLATE" ended up receiving thousands of traffic tickets.
• Charlie Chaplin once lost a Charlie Chaplin look-a-like contest.
• In the 80's a Coke advertising poster was recalled due to a hidden image of 'a woman performing an act'. The artist had put it in as a joke, someone noticed it on the back of a Coke truck. The artist was fired and sued.
• Parishioners at a church in Sweden celebrated Easter '09 by unveiling a 6-foot-tall (1.8-meter-tall) statue of Jesus that they had built out of 30,000 Lego blocks.
• After filming, it was discovered that one of the "Bond Girls" in For Your Eyes Only was a transsexual. A UK tabloid outed Caroline Cossey after the film released.
• Graham crackers were named for a man that felt an unhealthy diet led to sexual excess.

Buy now!

According to Gamefly's numbers, it mails out 590,000 games and receives 510,000 games back from subscribers a month. The company sees, depending on the mailer, between one and two percent of its games broken in transit. "Testing by GameFly and Postal Service personnel has revealed that breakage occurs during the processing of DVD mailers on Postal Service automated mail processing equipment," Gamefly states.

While some amount of theft and breakage is to be expected, Gamefly claims it has tried working with the Post Office to reduce the problems, to no avail. Further, the "solutions" still lead to broken discs, even with a significant increase in the cost of postage. Gamefly claims that mailers from Netflix and Blockbuster are treated better than their own product.

"On routine visits to multiple Postal Service facilities, GameFly’s employees have observed that a large percentage of mail pieces from Netflix and Blockbuster are culled from the automated letter processing stream," the complaint states. "GameFly has asked the Postal Service to give GameFly’s DVD mailers processing on terms and conditions comparable to the terms and conditions offered to two larger DVD mailers, Blockbuster and Netflix. The Postal Service has not done so."

Now that Blockbuster has began to offer video games for rental through its mailing service, a large problem has been created for Gamefly. "As a result of this initiative, GameFly now faces direct competition from a rival that is larger and longer established and which, because of the preferential treatment given by the Postal Service, enjoys a substantial cost advantage in the distribution of its DVDs to consumers."

General Fixes:

When spectating, buy menu won't switch tabs

Occasional HUD buttons displacement

Shoot + Zoom exploit with Sniper Rifle

Potential renderer crash

Score limit is correctly calculated in PowerStruggle

Vehicle damage direction display

Server crash when using last purchase to repeatedly buy vehicles

Updates & Improvements:

Added health bar of player who just killed you

Added automatic respawning in Instant Action/Team Instant Action, defaults to 20s after death

Added new visual hit indicator asset - shows whether you hit a player or a vehicle

Various messages for accessibility improvement

Reworked options menu

Added new map: Ruins

Balance:

Increased melee damage, and improved its consistency

Mezmer Games today confirmed the official release date for the upcoming arcade-RTS game Stalin vs Martians, in which you fight as the Soviet Union’s Red Army to defeat the Alien invasion of 1942. The battle begins on April 29, 2009. The game is a joint development of BWF, Dreamlore Studios and N-Game Studios.

Stalin vs. Martians, as the name suggests, is a game both masterfully trashy and absolutely over-the-top. Fun and accessible, it takes a simple arcade-like approach to the genre of real-time strategy. The player controls the Red Army, as it defends Earth from the Martian Invasion of 1942, a highly classified military operation which even today remains a closely guarded state secret. Stalin himself conducts the mission briefings and later even becomes a playable unit.

“The game is ready for deployment,” said Tom Söderlund, Executive Producer at Mezmer Games. “Fans of historically inaccurate World War II games everywhere will rejoice.”

Impulse has the game on pre-order sale, priced $15.95.

Allods Online will feature classic fantasy MMORPG gameplay that fans of the genre’s most successful titles can enjoy. It features extensive questing, intense player-versus-player combat, grand exploration, in-depth character development and plenty of social interaction. In the Astral, players will have the chance to put their wits and brawn to the test in larger-than-life Astral battles, the game’s giant fights between competing ‘Astral ships’ manned by multiple players. Adventurers from all over the world will have to choose between six races and eight character classes before choosing their allegiance between the two warring factions: the League and the Empire.

With over 12 million USD in funding, Allods Online is the best-funded Russian game development project in history. In addition, the team behind the title at Nival Online recently received the Best Online Game & Best Game Developer award at the 2008 Russian Game Development Conference.

“We have spiced up a full-blown fantasy MMORPG with the most compelling elements of space opera and science fiction, with epic battles between huge Astral ships,” said Sergey Orlovskiy, founder of Nival Online. “At the same time, we are keeping a deep focus on characters. Allods Online is not about Astral ships, but about the people on them.”

Sign up to the closed beta on the official Allods Online website.

An essential sport franchise, Pro Cycling Manager is back in a more polished than ever form to please fans of the popular series. This new edition, developed by the French studio Cyanide, promises to be the most exciting of all. It will include the most famous Tour de France 2009 faithfully reproduced in detail and for the first time the Spanish Tour (La Vuelta) which has become an official competition in the game.

Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 is the perfect mix between management and sport simulation. It puts you in the shoes of the general manager of one cycling team. Choose one of the 65 official cycling teams or create your own team from scratch using the new team creation system! You will be required to handle everyday aspects of this position: Choice of the teams, transfers, trainings, finances, gear or searches for new talent… many various missions are required to position the most competitive team on the starting line.

During the 180 races playable in real time 3D, you intervene directly to guide your cyclists. It's up to you to define the best strategies and tactics to win the race.

The management aspect of Pro Cycling Manager and its famous carrier mode offer many novelties and improvements for a richer game experience. General Managers can now freely create their own team, choose their secondary sponsors as well as identify and target new recruits thanks to an ingenious point system. They will also benefit from novelties like never-before-seen, customizable objectives, a new way to manage finances and a more realistic transfer AI… all these elements allow the game to be deeper and richer than any other.

The race is also packed with innovations. It has a new and more ergonomic game interface, and an improved AI to allow more realistic-than-ever behaviors from the cyclists. An amazing effort has been put into the legs' screenplay and rendering. The result has never been so beautiful and immersive. Water, vegetation, spectators, animations are some of the elements that have been reworked with a concern for realism in order to offer nicer and more beautiful stages to the players.

Last year's acclaimed track cycling mode is back: it includes 4 new explosive events that are discoverable in the game's new velodromes. Scratch race, flying 200m time trial, points race and omnium join last year's time trial, keirin and elimination to bring hours of intense gameplay.

Pro Cycling Manager – Tour de France 2009 will be released on PC in June 2009.

So today we got a pretty good new update from Gas Powered Games that we’ve been testing with today.

A lot of the changes have to do with tolerances. How much time should the game wait for others to join before it assumes they’re too slow and kicks them out before the game even starts? How much time should it wait for someone to join a lobby or a game before it says “No, they’re not going to get in?” and blocks them?

So today we played a lot of games with the new build and saw a lot of improvements. Thanks to tricks we’ve picked up from last week when the servers were being crushed, we have gotten a lot better at simulating peek server hours where the connection stuff is most likely to fail.

Right now, the issue we’re trying to fix is where people join a custom game and because they joined at the same time, they are not connected to each other. That’s what we’re play testing right now and the results look very promising.

Developing Games Is Like A Strategy Game

Like a strategy game, I’m in the unpleasant position of having to make choices on what people work on and what doesn’t.

If, by now, you have concluded that Demigod is an unusual game in many ways, you’re right. Typically, the publisher (Stardock) releases the game, collects data and sends them off to the game’s developer (Gas Powered Games) and waits for a “patch” which the publisher then puts through QA and then releases.

Demigod, as you probably have surmised, has been developed differently. Early last year, I pushed for Demigod to have more single-player elements. But over time, it became clear that everyone involved (at both Stardock and GPG) really enjoyed it more as a multiplayer game. But in my mind, if you’re going to do that, you need to have lots of cool things like match making, and tournament stuff and long-term expandability.

That’s where Stardock started getting involved in development little by little. At first, it was just a single developer. Then another, and then another. Pretty soon, we were adding overlays to present more player data, developing a friends list and other community features along with a multiplayer match-making, pantheon stuff, etc.

Stardock and GPG get along great. But you are talking about two veteran development teams working on some pretty sophisticated stuff at great distances. That’s where I’ve increasingly become involved in pressing both Stardock and GPG development teams on what needs to go in when. So if you have an issue with Demigod, don’t blame anyone but me because since the game’s release, I’ve essentially taken on the overall development prioritization for good or ill.

Ramifications

So for example, we know that most people can connect to other people. We know this for a fact. The problem is that for a significant percentage of people, it’s #$%# flakey.

You know what I mean. You set up a custom game and it becomes a fiasco getting people into that custom game because people aren’t connected. Or you try to get a pantheon game going and players get kicked out or you end up with 2 on 2 with a bunch of bots. Or the same thing with skirmish.

And then there’s the people who just get NAT failed messages or who just can’t connect no matter what.

I’ve gotten a lot of email telling me that I’m “killing Demigod” because I keep making things out to be “worse than they are”. It’s not my job to paint a happy picture. I’m an engineer, not a marketer. And I hang out enough on the chat channel and on the forums to know that the problems mentioned above are real, must be addressed ASAP!

So anyway, during this week the big architecture change going on is the UDP proxy server setup. But IT has told me that it will take a few days to do proper load testing on it (i.e. what happens when there’s 20,000 people on there?)

But the tactical things I’ve been focusing Stardock/GPG onto this week are fixing the connection issues for those who play but find the game flakey, making Pantheon and Skirmish not have bots in them if people have experience, working on the favor point tracking, etc.

Since I have only N developers at Stardock and M at GPG, that means that if I’m focusing them on those things, other things will go more slowly (including the Proxy stuff).

Tonight’s Build Is Being Tested

So like on Tuesday, we do have a new build, this one much more significant because it includes a new Demigod.exe too, but we’re testing it and since it’s 9pm as I write this, it’s not a good idea to put it up this late so it looks like it’ll be tomorrow.

Possible Solution: Game Running Slow

We uncovered a bizarre but reproduceable scenario where Google Desktop running while Demigod was running caused Demigod's framerate, particularly in MP, to absolutely tank. It comes across as making the game extremely laggy (i.e. fine for 3 seconds, then a pause, etc.).

We don't know why this is, but I wanted to make sure you guys are aware of it.

Status Updates Long Term

I’ve read comments that some people do like these status reports. Since we’re starting to come to the end of the serious connection problems (it may not seem like to some externally but it really is getting pretty close) I was wondering if people would like to continue to see these things when we start to talk about ideas for new Demigods, new items, new multiplayer modes, how you’d like to see clans and groups and friends handled. I really don’t mind doing these but obviously don’t want people to get sick of reading these walls of text.

Cheers all and see you tomorrow!

“We are humbled by how gamers have responded to Guild Wars over the past four years, and we are proud that the game and its community have helped to continually shape, define, and expand the genre,” said ArenaNet studio head Mike O’Brien. “Our subscription-free business model has proven to be a big hit with gamers, bringing an enormous and diverse online community to the game.”

By now I'm sure you all have Guild Wars, so um, keep on keeping on.

Boards

• Asus M4A79 Deluxe - Neoseeker
• ASUS ROG Rampage II Gene mATX X58 - Tweaktown
• EVGA X58 SLI Classified 760 - VR-Zone

  Cases
  

• Cooler Master Storm Sniper - Hardware Logic
• In Win Allure Case - Hardware Bistro
• In Win Metal Suit GD AL-13 Mid Tower - ThinkComputers.org

  Cooling
  

• Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 - PureOC

  CPU
  

• AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition - AMDZone
• AMD Phenom 2 X4 955 Black Edition - Bjorn3D
• AMD Phenom 2 X4 955 Black Edition - I4U

  Memory
  

• Core i7 Dual Channel vs Triple Channel Memory Test - NinjaLane

  Power Supply
  

• Enermax Galaxy Evo 1250W PSU - Jonnyguru

  Rat Lube
  

• Razer Goliathus - TechPowerUp

  Video
  

• XFX GeForce GTS250 - Motherboards.org
• ZOTAC GeFORCE GTX 275 896MB - Future Looks

Today's TGIF question:

What games topped your most played list last week?